Abstract
Human non-hairy (glabrous) skin of the fingers, palms and soles wrinkles after prolonged exposure to water. Wrinkling is a sympathetic nervous system-dependent process but little is known about the physiology and potential functions of water-induced skin wrinkling. Here we investigated the idea that wrinkling might improve handling of wet objects by measuring the performance of a large cohort of human subjects (n = 40) in a manual dexterity task. We also tested the idea that skin wrinkling has an impact on tactile acuity or vibrotactile sensation using two independent sensory tasks. We found that skin wrinkling did not improve dexterity in handling wet objects nor did it affect any aspect of touch sensitivity measured. Thus water-induced wrinkling appears to have no significant impact on tactile driven performance or dexterity in handling wet or dry objects.
Highlights
Water-induced wrinkling of human non-hairy skin of the fingers, palms and soles is an as yet not fully understood phenomenon influenced by water temperature, pH, and tonicity [1,2]
Like water-induced wrinkling, heat-induced vasoconstriction is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system and was shown to occur upon warm water immersion of the glabrous skin which is rich in arterio-venous shunts or anastomoses and sweat glands [14,15,16]
Counter-balancing was effective and asymmetric skill transfer could be excluded [25]. It has recently been shown in a small cohort of human volunteers that wrinkled index finger and thumb skin improves performance in a manual dexterity task selectively for handling wet objects as opposed to dry objects [20]
Summary
Water-induced wrinkling of human non-hairy (glabrous) skin of the fingers, palms and soles is an as yet not fully understood phenomenon influenced by water temperature, pH, and tonicity [1,2]. Hsieh et al [11] provided supportive evidence for a causal relationship between water-induced wrinkling and vasoconstriction by measuring blood flow velocity before and after water-immersion of the hands in patients who underwent digital replantation. They observed that upon water immersion the skin of replanted fingers failed to wrinkle and the blood flow was increased (vasodilatatory effect). In order to perform such a study we chose to reinvestigate the effect of water-induced wrinkling on the handling of wet objects in our human test subjects. The finding that fingertip wrinkles improve handling of wet objects could not be reproduced in our human cohort
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